WT students collect donations for families in West, TX

WT students are putting forward efforts to help families in West.

Students were writing on Facebook and making phone calls saying they wanted to help parents and children affected from the explosion. The university's student government initiated a donation drive Thursday to ship off to West Friday.

Vice President José López says, "The entire student body has expressed concern and wanting to help out with the West effort... Our new student body vice president elect. She is from West. And she's a friend of mine so I, it was easily to correlate the two."

22 year-old Amanda Kraemer lived in West all her life until she came to study at WT four years ago. Kraemer says, "It was just a really like close nit community. Like everybody, every time you walked into a place, like you knew somebody, you said hi. People had conversations all the time. And just to think that there's, you know, members of our community who are no longer there, and then there's just places that are completely gone. It's really going to change the atmosphere. And it's going to be hard knowing that they're no longer there."

Kraemer says her parents, brother, and sister live in West. She found out about the disaster when her family called. Kraemer says, "All they knew is that there was an explosion. And that they were evacuating certain areas. And that they weren't going to know anything for a while."

Her parents were safe and able to provide shelter. She says, "Some of like the families that live in other areas were like coming to our house... An aunt and her kids, and everything were on her way to our house because they were being evacuated from their area."

If you'd like to help out families in West, you can take donations including clothes, blankets, pillows, adult diapers and toys to WT's Student Government Office from 8:00am to 12:00pm Friday.

You can also donate money to help pay for postage when they mail the items Friday afternoon.